Recently in this blog I spoke of how Phillip Guston must have felt. Let’s unpack that a little bit. In the 1950′ and 60’s PG was a AB EX painter in the AB EX tradition (think Pollack-like) totally admired by critics, curators, as well as buyers. Fast forward to the late 60’s/early 70’s and PG shows a group of paintings that are idiosyncratic, cartoon-like scenes of tragic human comedy.
This was not in keeping with the AB EX way.
However what drove the new paintings was the idiosyncratic nature and eccentricity that truly showed the gutsy nature of this work. It would have been easy to go back to the older AB EX work and call the one show an experiment – but like Bob Dylan going electric and then being booed for the next two years, he overcame fashion and built compositions for himself (as did Guston).
As for me, I need to be careful not to bend to the fashion of the day – but to stand as a single voice that represents that singular experience. This is true even with serialized work (like the Tangram Suite). It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that art is a individual presenting something to experience. It may or may not coincide with the viewers expectations, however, it is that shared experience that is the true nature of art.